I don't know what a zomedy is, but I like it.

The Mad A Johnny Kalangis film.

About a week and a half ago I got a call out of the blue from Kyree Vibrant, a long time friend and crime partner of mine. "Are you doing anything tonight?" She asked. Remembering that the last time she asked me to do something for her I had wound up dressed as a garden gnome for her wedding, I prepared to dig in my heels. "Well, I -" I said. "You have to come to Johnny's movie tonight. He has a screening. You have to." I'm not sure how she managed to convey a puppy dog look to me over the non-visual phone lines, but somehow I wound up at her husband's film.

This last minute call had come because her husband Johnny Kalangis had a film in the Canadian Filmmaker's Festival, and had originally expected a small screening that maybe the cast and crew could get to. It turned out that the festival had decided to make his film the opening night Gala. It might have had something to do with Billy Zane being the star. Or maybe they just really liked zombies.

I really like zombies. I especially like them when they're powered by diabolical meat. On those two factors alone I would have liked this movie, but what I got was a surprisingly good film. I say surprisingly not because I am surprised that Johnny made a good film (I'm not - he's pretty good at all this), but because of the unexpected twist at the beginning of the film. (You can open with a twist? Who knew?) It's really a heartwarming story about a father, a Dr. Jason Hunt (Zane, who's actually very funny in this) and his daughter Amy (The beautifully petulant Maggie Castle) who need to reconnect after the death of Amy's mother. They've left town for a getaway weekend with Dad's new girlfriend Monica (The bitchtacular Shauna McDonald) and Amy's new boy. This would all be a terrific setup for a TV Movie of the Week, If it weren't for the fact that what drives dad and daughter together is a ravenous horde of mindless zombies.

In all of my years watching horror films, I can honestly say I never expected to see a father and daughter coming to understand each other while beset by zombies in a farmer's field, or hear the words "Are you flirting with him?" after they meet a potential psychopath (incidentally, the room on set that Johnny referred to as 'The Sex Barn' during production is worth the price of admission). There's plenty of blood and guts flying, fulfilling the horror quota, but this film is just plain funny. See it if it gets to the theatres near you, rent it if it comes to your video store, or stay up 'till 2 on a weeknight if it's playing late on the teevee. You won't be disappointed.

Nerdcore I

Nerdcore for Life Trailer

NSFW : Language

I'm not actually sure what order I should have done today's and tomorrow's posts in, so I asked both of my roommates whether they thought I should go general to specific or specific to general. One said the first choice, and one wouldn't say.

Okay, now that I've got the meta-blogging out of the way, today and tomorrow I'm going to talk about Nerdcore Hiphop, or Geeksta Rap. I have found trailers for not one, but two trailers for completely different, yet oddly similar, documentaries on the subject due out this summer.

I have always self-identified as a nerd, or geek, primarily based on my roots. Sometime not long after it was determined that there might actually be money in this Internet Thingie, it actually became socially acceptable to do so. But perhaps the truest expression of the arrival of the Chic Geek was the rising popularity of our own genres of music.

Nerdcore Hiphop is rap music for nerds. It's just like regular hiphop, but instead of rapping about pimps, ho's and glocks, you rap about otaku, j-girls, and 9-sided dice. As a genre of music it's a relatively recent phenomonon (the term was coined in 2000). Nerdcore for Life is a documentary about the culture growing up around this undrground genre (almost all Nerdcore music is 'Net only - very few CD's have been released) and the artists that perform it. According to a recent article on Canada.com:

Dan Lamoureux, an audio-visual technician in Chicago, was inspired to make the 90-minute film Nerdcore for Life after he and a friend ended up in a nerdcore audience last year "almost as a joke."

"It was the most insane thing you could imagine, it was so bizarre," he says. "We were at a pretty hip Chicago club and the place was filled with nerds! All the fans were nerds, they were doing nerdy dances. It was not a group I've ever seen at a club before."

So far all we have to go on for this film is the trailer (the site does not even mention a release date, unfortunately), but as a Nerdcore fanboy I'll have to see it when it's out (assuming it does - there's a donation page on the site, but see yesterday's post for why I have no money to donate).

Tomorrow I'll be posting about the other Nerdcore doc, and the artist who got me hooked. Stay tuned.